Emilee Struss

My eyelids are heavy. Natural daylight diminishes from my room with the sunset, so I turn on the one lamp in my apartment. It was a long day.  However, I need to write. I must write.

Sometimes I feel like I have a sixth sense.

I am sure other people have this, too. And, no, I do not see dead people. If you see dead people, you should seek help immediately. My sixth sense is the feeling of time. Even more so, the sense that time is slipping away. It’s moving too fast, and I can’t stop it. I can’t accomplish all the desires that lay undiscovered before me. One of those things I desire is to inspire others through writing. Passion ignites passion. Just by following my passion to write, I can inspire others to pursue their passions.

Some evenings I sit in my cheap apartment, with thin walls, aware of it all. Aware of the students around me. All of them searching for their passion and purpose in life. Various styles of music entertain them through headphones while working on essays and projects. Outside, I hear screechy breaks from a Budweiser truck pulling up beside the liquor store. A tow truck drives by and removes a vehicle from its all too convenient parking spot. Someone knocks on my front door. Time passes in this way for each of us, unnoticed. It slips by while we deal with the oddities of life. For so many, passion gets lost in the business and busyness of life. In my apartment, a young man comes through to check the vents, and smiles at me sweetly. He is probably a student himself. Back in my room, a microwave hum tells me that one of my roommates is home. I think about unfinished homework, the fact that I have work early tomorrow morning and my heavy eyelids. I wrestle with the idea of staying up later to write.

I realize that if I fall asleep, that will be another day wasted. Sure, I attended class, went to work, and accomplished small tasks around the house. But what did I do in regards to pursuing my passion for writing? I think about all the statistics. Those living out their last breaths on earth commonly regret one thing: not pursuing their passion. I look out the window of my apartment and watch the snow drift at an angle. I am aware of it all, raw to the reality that this fire inside me to write could waste away. It could get drown out by time. By life.

Back in my apartment room, a single lamp lights a circle on my desk. The Budweiser truck has left. The tow truck took his victim and vanished. The guy checking the vents has gone. I hear my roommate’s door shut. The sun has gone down and the snow continues to sway through the air. My eyes are still heavy. The cursor on my computer blinks at me. I realize the importance of seeking out this fire within me to tell of something. To reach out and ignite the flame within others. Even with the sixth sense of time slipping away, and words unwritten, I have to write. It is my passion. It is to be pursued.

Emilee Struss recently graduated with a degree in Creative Writing from Minnesota State University, Mankato. Currently, she lives in Bellevue, Idaho, and follows several passions including rock climbing, trail running and of course… writing.

Francis DiClemente

When I read poetry I eschew formalists who pack their poems with words I need to look up in an online dictionary. I avoid books filled with single poems that run multiple pages and prefer compact works imbued with concrete details and spoken with an honest voice. I like to feel the writer behind the words, and an example of my taste is Samuel Menashe.

I recently read The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, and while I admire Stevens’ intellect, his use of imagery and technical construction, I struggled to slice through the book and skipped over the last fifty or so pages. I couldn’t wait to reach the end.

I am not smart enough to interpret much of his symbolism, and I didn’t want to work that hard anyway. I believe reading should be a pleasure, like it was when I was a kid and would snag the evening sports page from my father while he sat at the kitchen table after dinner. At the same time poetry, like classical music, can produce a sublime experience for its audience. It has the power to examine life, making observations that resonate with readers and inspire further thought.

And three “poets of the street”—my go-to trifecta for verse—deliver in this regard. I admire Langston Hughes, Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski for the rich details they offer and a palpable authenticity that leaps across the page; you get the sense they not only wrote these poems but lived them as well.

For brevity, we turn to “Suicide’s Note,” where Hughes uses just twelve words to tell a dramatic story:

The calm,

Cool face of the river

Asked me for a kiss.

The story has a satisfying conclusion while also giving readers numerous options for interpretation.

I prefer short, narrative poems with clean resolutions. That’s because I often find these poems online and read them during my lunch hour. I will peruse the site PoemHunter.com and read through a few poems in between bites of my daily turkey or tuna sandwich.

One of my favorite poems is “Hell is a Lonely Place” by Charles Bukowski, which I came across on PoemHunter and also read in Bukowski’s book Septuagenarian Stew: Stories & Poems.

In the poem, Bukowski describes an aging, disease-plagued couple. The man has cancer of the mouth and the woman suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. The man faces the humiliation of putting “his wife in rubber diapers like a baby.” The poem concludes with the man shooting and killing his wife in an act of mercy and then turning the gun on himself.

Bukowski writes:

the shots didn’t arouse

the neighbors.

later

the burning tv dinners

did.

The police investigate the scene, go through the couple’s belongings and discover a closed savings account and a checkbook with a balance of $1.14.

Just like Hughes with “Suicide’s Note,” Bukowski gives us a full story arc. And the poem stands out because of its honesty, clear language and emotional gravity.

Bukowski drew me in with the details about the man’s decaying jaw, the rubber diapers, the empty bank account and the burning TV dinners. I felt a deep empathy for the man and woman; I sensed the story could have been true and I mourned the couple’s loss.

And that’s the strength of story-based poems. They have the ability to make us sympathize with others and reflect on our existence. It’s just my opinion, but formalist poetry with reserved language and obscure references cannot measure up. The words do not endure because they fail to reach the heart. These works dance in the realm of intellect and never risk the courage to throw a punch to the gut. And I believe poetry should aim to elevate our consciousness and create an emotional response in the reader.

Francis DiClemente is a video producer and freelance writer who lives in Syracuse, New York. He is the author of three poetry chapbooks and his blog can be found at francisdiclemente.wordpress.com.

Author’s Photo Credit: Susan Kahn

References:

Bukowski, Charles. Septuagenarian Stew: Stories & Poems. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1990.

Hughes Langston. Selected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Vintage Classics, 1990.

Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, 1982.

Noelle Sterne

After too many years, I was painfully getting back to writing. For four years, I’d faithfully scribbled my “morning pages” (per Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way), the only writing I could manage. As I struggled through countless tear-soaked journaling sessions, my fragile new hope told me it was time.

For weeks, in the local newspaper I’d studied the Sunday magazine feature called “Great Neighborhood Secrets” on terrific but little-known places and events in the area. Only 100 words—I could creep into that. But what to write?

One day, crossing Broadway from the market, I walked in front of the firehouse to get to the library. And between the two buildings, there it was! A small pond, almost completely hidden by tall rushes and overhanging trees, pristine, intact. I’d never noticed it before.  If I hadn’t, probably others hadn’t either.

Lily pads floated on the water’s surface, insects hummed and buzzed, and small birds flitted overhead. The pond was an anomaly, an oasis, and a comfort that all of nature hadn’t succumbed to concrete and strip malls. Like the bubbles from a small fish in the pond, my title emerged: “Hidden Jewel.”

I tapped out a too-long first draft. After weeks of editing, cutting, and polishing, on a crisp November morning I sent the piece out to the newspaper.

Winter dragged on. No reply. Spring emerged and grew warmer. Nothing. As I gained writing strength, I became preoccupied with other pieces. But my annoyance grew the more I checked my log. The paper could have at least replied with a form email.

Then, in late May, the phone rang. Seeing the newspaper’s name on the caller ID, I assumed it was another computer-generated, randomly dialed, automatic message subscription solicitation. I answered half-heartedly, with No already in my voice.

To my shock, the editor identified himself. “I apologize for the late response. We’d like to publish your piece—two months from now.”

I tried to form words but could only groan with paralyzed ecstasy.

“Oh,” he continued, taking my strange sound for assent, “where shall we send the $50 check?”

When I hung up and regained my power of speech, I ran screaming into my husband’s study. He was on a European conference call closing a big deal, but this was more important. He graciously put the CEO and CFO on hold and rejoiced with me.

The piece came out on a bright Sunday in July. We bought all 12 copies at the local newsstand and sent several to friends. One even sent it to the mayor.

Since then, I’ve published and sold many pieces and have written many more. The morning pages have delivered what Cameron promised. I write almost daily now, and the ideas and projects keep flowing. But “Hidden Jewel” was especially meaningful.

Maybe, you could say, I should have found the impetus to continue writing without creating this piece. Maybe, you also could say, I shouldn’t have needed the validation of the sale. But after the long dark days and nights of wrestling with the self-depreciation demons, I freely admit that first sale thrilled me, and more. It gave me the hope, inspiration, and impetus to keep writing.

© 2016 Noelle Sterne

Noelle Sterne (Ph.D.) publishes in many venues, including Author Magazine, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Children’s Book Insider, Graduate Schools Magazine, Inspire Me Today, and Writer’s Digest. Her Trust Your Life: Forgive Yourself and Go After Your Dreams (Unity Books) helps readers reach lifelong yearnings. Her handbook based on her academic coaching practice assists doctoral students: Challenges in Writing Your Dissertation: Coping With the Emotional, Interpersonal, and Spiritual Struggles (Rowman & Littlefield Education).  www.trustyourlifenow

Richard LeBlond

Tragic events often change the lives of survivors. Some become part of the team raising money to find a cancer cure. Others rally against drunk drivers or lobby on behalf of safer air travel. At least a small amount of survivor guilt is probably involved in these life changes. But I’m sure most are inspired by the higher motive of not letting the victim or victims die in vain. The survivor feels a responsibility, even an obligation, to set things right.

For nearly 40 years, I was burdened by that obligation because I was unable to fulfill it from a failure to write. One day in Athens, Greece, in the mid-1970s, I witnessed hundreds of men and women holding hands and marching unarmed towards the sound of automatic weapon fire – that is, the sound of carnage – during an uprising under the military dictatorship of Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos.

It was one of several traumatic events I witnessed or endured during two and a half years in southern Europe and north Africa. The trip started as an open-ended vacation, but by the time it was over, I had spent a day surrounded by Moroccan police armed with submachine guns; sat in a Guardia Civil interrogation room convinced I would be sentenced to six years and a day in a Spanish prison; befriended an American who, against his will, had become a pig inspector in Yugoslavia; then had my own personal encounter with Athens’ secret police. And for a while I worked for a newspaper that was likely financed by the CIA. (I think this paragraph would make a good movie.)

I returned to the States in 1974 full of these incredible stories, but it took me nearly 40 years to write them. I lacked confidence. More than once I told myself I was a second-rate writer with a third-rate mind. During that long interim, I kept hearing the voices of the Athens marchers and knew their story might die with me if I couldn’t set it down. In all those years, I never found another account of what I had witnessed.

I had written a brief op-ed piece about the marchers back in 2002, but I still needed to write the whole story. By the winter of 2010, I realized I would have to write it whether I was ready or not. Nearly 70 years old and 13 years into my COPD, I had to assume I was running out of time. And I wanted to relate all of my adventures in the Mediterranean, or at least as many as I could squeeze past my censor. Some things happened others don’t need to know about, and there is embarrassment enough in what the censor allowed. Autobiography teeters on the edge between which lies to tell and what truths to leave out.

February 2010 was a good time to be indoors. Thanks to the closing window of opportunity, I had reached a truce with my demons, and out poured the stories. I wrote nonstop, six to seven days a week, 8-10 hours a day for two months. I began each day listening to the same piece of music, during my morning walk, a 10-minute-long Salve Regina written in the 1500s by a Spanish priest during the Inquisition. It set the perfect mood, as my journey had begun among the gitanos on the south coast of Spain, where I had my own taste of the Inquisition with General Franco’s army of police.

During the decades of not writing, I had told my stories several times to friends, which helped to keep details alive. Even so, I had forgotten a few names, and I’m fairly certain one character was actually two. But the stories remained clear, and I can still experience their actuality in my mind. That is especially true of the Athens marchers.

Hemingway said “The first draft of anything is shit.” But for me the first draft became another level of inspiration, and I wrote with a greater sense of responsibility, propelled by the marchers. Every time I came to their passage, I bawled from reliving the experience. Even now, I bawl when I read that passage. It is my own little post-traumatic stress disorder.

I found the task of editing and rewriting to be enjoyable and fulfilling, like working on a four-dimensional tapestry. The first draft was the warp, and it became a process of adding on and pulling out, of changing forms and colors. The rewriting process brought new insights and taught me how to let things go. For the first time in my life, writing felt like art.

Richard LeBlond is a retired biologist living in North Carolina. Since 2014, his essays and photographs have appeared in numerous U.S. and international journals, including Montreal Review, Hippocampus, Compose, Smoky Blue, Appalachia, and Still Point Arts Quarterly.

After taking a break for the summer, the South 85 Journal staff is ready to read again!  Our reading period is open, and we will be accepting submissions through April 30, 2017.

We’d love to see what you’ve been working on.  If you have something ready, you can submit now.

Our next issue is the Fall / Winter 2016 issue, and we will release it on December 15, 2016.

Our entire staff from last issue is returning, and we would like to welcome a few new staff members:

● Poetry Editors – Russell Jackson and Chris Menezes
● Fiction Editors – Jessie Marshall and Joshua Springs

All of our editors are students or graduates of the Converse College Low-Residency MFA Program.

Thank you for continuing to support our journal!

Kelly DeLong

After decades of writing, I have discovered a single truth—there is only one reason to write and that is for the sense of satisfaction I get from sitting at my desk a couple hours a day, putting to paper the life inside my head.  For me, there is no other reason to write.  There can’t be.  It’s pretty clear by now that I’ll never make a living at it, never win a major award and never become famous.  Moreover, if I stopped writing today, other than me, there is no one who would care.

That might sound sad or pathetic, but it’s not.  I began writing in the first place because I’d always known that there was something inside of me that needed a release.  The more I wrote, the more I felt I accomplished something that was important to me.  For years I wrote without a thought about publishing or making money.  I just wanted to write.  I needed to write.  It was as simple as that.

When I was a teenager I wrote stuff I called “poetry.”  I was quite proud of it, so much so that I showed it to my speech professor at the community college I attended.  Rumor had it he was a poet.  A week after handing him a stack of my work, I entered his office and asked him what he thought.  He shook his head and handed my pages back to me.  On the top poem, he’d written “What is this?” and “This doesn’t make sense.”  I discovered that day that I wasn’t a poet.  But that didn’t stop me from taking a poetry workshop at the state university I transferred to.  In that class I learned that in order to write in a particular genre, you actually had to read that particular genre.  I didn’t read poetry, which was one of the reasons I struggled to write it.

Still, I had to write.   I’d grown up a non-reader, who just got by in school.  Not until I was twenty did I finally start reading books on my own.  By the time I found my way to a fiction workshop, I’d been voraciously reading novels and short stories for a little over a year.  That might not sound like a long time, but it was enough for me to conclude that the release I needed would come from writing fiction.  I had found my form.

I wrote when in school, when out of school, when I was working full-time jobs.  Nothing killed my love of writing fiction.  I made my way to an MFA program, and after seven years of writing, I published my first short story in a magazine that wasn’t affiliated with the school I attended.  It would take several years before I published something else.  Of course, when I say publish, I’m talking about placing a story in a magazine with a circulation of fifty.  I knew my work was only being read by about three or four people (I’m including my mother). I was gratified though that somebody out there thought my work was worth the time it took to put it in print.

Eventually, I published a couple of pieces in magazines that actually paid money, and, then, one of the great surprises of my life happened—a publisher wanted to publish not one but two of my manuscripts.  I would have two books published!  The publisher was new, very small (a one-man operation) and couldn’t pay an advance.  I didn’t mind.  I was elated.  Bigger things were certainly headed my way.  I just knew that my books would sell and that my next book would be picked up by a major publisher who would pay me a big advance, and, as a result of my book’s success, prestigious magazines would solicit stories from me, providing me with an audience who was emotionally connected to my writing and who would pay to keep that connection.

I soon learned though that my books, like most of the thousands and thousands of books published every year, are read by next to no one.  Also, getting my stories published by literary magazines—big or small—was as difficult as ever.  It felt to me that after nearly thirty years of writing, I had gotten nowhere.  I reached the realization that my work would have an emotional connection to no one since no one was reading it.  My writing hadn’t had an effect on anyone.  That knowledge, I have to admit, pained and depressed me for a while.

It did not stop me from writing, however.  I reached the conclusion that my writing had a tremendous effect on one person’s life.  Mine.  It had shaped my life, had pushed me to practice, to improve, to reach a certain level of competency and skill that nearly everyone would like to achieve no matter what they do.  Writing has become a part of who I am.  It doesn’t matter if no one else knows it.  I know it.  That’s enough.  I’ll always be the only person who’s read all my work. I’ll always be the only person who cares about every word, every punctuation mark I put on the page.  So be it.  I have spent countless hours as my desk contemplating my creations, and I have valued every minute of it.

Kelly DeLong is published in many literary journals including The Sun, Evansville Review, The Jabberwock Review, Roanoke Review, Palo Alto Review, among others. He is also the author of the novel The Poor Sucker. Further, his non-fiction book, The Freshman Year at an HBCU was published last year.

Matthew McEver

In my writing classes, I emphasize the symbiotic relationship between reading and writing. On the first day of class, my students hear that the quality of our writing is a direct reflection of what kind of reader we’ve been until this point in our lives. Our writing tells the world what kind of readers we are.

When I’m not talking about writing, I’m usually talking about music, rock music — and many of my favorite bands wear their influences on their sleeves. Guns N’ Roses is on my mind right now, actually ringing in my ears from their show in Atlanta a few nights ago. When I listen to Guns N’ Roses, it’s apparent that the band built its musical vocabulary by listening to Iggy and the Stooges, early Aerosmith, Janis Joplin, the Sex Pistols, and the Rolling Stones, among others. On the literary side of things, when I read the fiction of someone like Cormac McCarthy, it’s obvious that he’s read…well, pretty much everything, but especially Melville, Twain, Joyce, Milton, Faulkner, O’Connor, and Dostoevsky.

Think about your own work. When people read your writing, what influences do they see? That question should terrify you. It terrifies me. I fear that I’ll be exposed. I’m embarrassed when I think of what I haven’t read, and my writing tells the world what kind of reader I am.

Bluntly speaking, some writers are lazy readers. Don’t take what I’m about to say as a swipe against current fiction. I have no issue with contemporary fiction. In fact, right now, I’m reading Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. It’s a book that I should be reading. But I’ve yet to read War and Peace, and I feel guilty about it. I keep putting it off. We treat the classics like a chore, pushing aside Tolstoy or Conrad, reaching for something current, telling ourselves that we’re staying abreast of the trends. Besides, we trudged through Heart of Darkness in college.

Yet we read differently as we mature. I first read Conrad at nineteen, comparatively inexperienced at life. Back then, I considered Conrad the equivalent of eating my cultural spinach. Now, I practically meditate on passages from his work. The difference: back then, I was nineteen, and I wasn’t a writer.

Intimidated by the density and complexity of Faulkner or Conrad? Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Then it’s time to embrace the notion that there’s a lot of great writing that not only lends itself to multiple readings, but requires multiple readings. Do people really “get” Shakespeare the first time they hear it? Of course not. We have to think in terms of first-draft reading, second draft reading, third draft reading. I would never listen to a favorite album only once (especially a Guns N’ Roses album) and conclude that I “got” it. Yet we treat literature this way. We insist that literature be immediately accessible, that literature come down to our level. We call that route the path of least resistance, and there’s no artist worth his or her salt who ever took it.

Take a few minutes and jot down the titles that you’ve read this year, thus far. How challenging of a reading list do you have? Would you be proud to share it? Ideally, you want a reading list that helps you to move back and forth, staying in touch with your contemporaries while also drawing from work that has stood the test of time. And if you need inspiration, do some digging and discover who your favorite authors cite as their influences. What novels or collections inspired and informed their work?

Ultimately, when you’re not writing, then you should be reading, and what you choose to read becomes the DNA or your poetry or prose.

When all else fails, remember what Faulkner says: “Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write.”

Matthew McEver is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of North Georgia and holds the MFA in Creative Writing from Converse College in South Carolina.

Cinelle Barnes

I write because I am the last to remember.

My mother lives between personas, dissociated from the world.  Some days she knows she has a daughter and a granddaughter, and I get a text message: What’s up? How’s the girl?  Other days she forgets that I am now married with a child, and will reply to my Merry Christmas from us three with a Don’t forget to moisturize, use pads not tampons, wear a training bra.  I don’t know where or how she lives; I don’t think she does either.  Her micro-amnesias make her days seem like years and her years like days.  She forgets to brush her teeth and she forgets that she has almost died in front of me at least three times.

My father had a stroke in April.  Because of it, he experiences cognitive lapses.  His diabetes mimics symptoms of Alzheimer’s and dementia: he attempts to unlock cars that aren’t his, misses medical appointments, scrambles for house keys he’s been clutching in his fist all along, and emails the same questions he already asked over voicemail: How do I copy and paste documents? How do I attach cover letters?  My Papa hasn’t worked in seven years.

My brother dilutes recollections of broken champagne glasses, knives, and dead babies with vodka, tequila, and beer; he pulverized them along with the pills he crushed to dust and snorted.  He has worked as a club DJ for sixteen years, spinning vinyl for a crowd from nine p.m. to three in the morning, and sleeping during the day to evade sunshine and conversation.

Even the house we lived in no longer serves us in the business of remembering.  It has long been demolished; and where it was once erected, a mini-mall now stands.  I am as physical as these remembrances get.  My mother, father, and brother lead lives of forgetting, while I have made a living out of remembering.  My email signature reads: Cinelle Barnes, Memoirist and Essayist.

I also write to cope with post-traumatic stress, a disorder with manifestations I’ve experienced since I was thirteen years old: palpitations, hyper-vigilance, overachievement, over-exercising, a constant urge to urinate, self-injury, tightness in the throat, difficulty swallowing, difficulty breathing, inability to relax, excessive worrying, nightmares, and flashbacks.

Unlike my parents and sibling, I have been blessed with an extraordinary memory: sensory memory, short-term memory, long-term memory, explicit (narrative) memory, implicit (emotional) memory, episodic memory, and semantic memory.

I remember that my mother’s morning tea smelled like tangerines and her perfume like rose-and-orchid.  I remember that my Papa’s beard felt soft at the chin and coarse by his sideburns.  I remember that my brother’s Ninja Turtles were a deep forest green while my father’s ferns were sage.  I remember that our sheets smelled like Clorox and my brother’s shirts like baby powder.  I remember that blood was crimson on my mother’s nightgown and black in her hair.  I remember that the dead baby in Mama’s arms had two wrinkles on his nose and one chap on his upper lip.

And I remember trying to forget.

I moved to New York when I was sixteen.  I stepped off the train at Penn Station thinking, This is my new life.  The push from co-commuters through the tunnels, the ascent on the escalator from underground to street level, birthed me into a new existence.  For seven years, I partied in the Meatpacking District, went to school in Chelsea, lived and worked on the Upper West and East Sides, brunched in the Lower East, and bought books and clothes and gelato in Williamsburg and DUMBO.  I went by my childhood nickname.  I lost weight and defined biceps and abs.  I cut my hair.  Striding down Seventh Avenue’s spit-covered sidewalk, I pressed down on my mind’s delete key; working in the art and fashion industries, I acquired a new motherboard – or at least I thought I had.

But then I met a guy. He said, “Tell me everything.”

And I did.

He asked me questions like, “If you weren’t in art or fashion, what would you be doing?”

I told him that all I’d ever wanted was to write.  So he gave me a Pilot V5 pen, a stack of 3×5 notecards, a lined Moleskin notebook, and a directive: “Go write.”

I wrote everything, and the new motherboard broke.  I wrote everything again, and my wires re-circuited back to 1986, 1989, 1990, 1994, 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2003.  The symptoms came back: palpitations, hyper-vigilance, overachievement, over-exercising, a constant urge to urinate, self-injury, tightness in the throat, difficulty swallowing, difficulty breathing, inability to relax, excessive worrying, nightmares, and flashbacks.

I told him, “I am breaking.”

And he said, “You’re becoming a new kind of beautiful.”

Every Thursday, at four o’clock, he drove me to counseling.  And every Thursday, at half past five, he wrapped me in his Marmot jacket, picked me up off the therapist’s couch, walked me back to the car and took me home.  He held my hand as he drove through Charleston’s sunshowers.  He prayed for me.  He fed me salsa and chips while I did therapy homework, which was, coincidentally, the same assignments due to my MFA mentor: write your memories; take the ugly and make something beautiful.

The counselor called it “prolonged exposure,” a form of behavioral and cognitive therapy designed to treat PTSD.  By re-experiencing the traumatic events through remembering and engaging – or, in literary terms, (re)creating a sense of time, place, and attitude – I gradually became desensitized from objects and situations that used to cause distress.  I went through pictures; followed my mother’s paper trail of newspaper clippings, court papers, and health records; and went on a virtual tour of my childhood neighborhood through Google Earth.  I interviewed relatives, asking them to describe moments they had witnessed: my parents and the helpers digging a grave in the garden, my mother running and stabbing the air with an envelope opener, and my brother over-dosing in his car.

My writing mentors assigned prompts and reading that retrieved data from my brain’s primary storage (long-term history) and cache (short-term history).  I processed the data out loud to my therapist while holding on to tappers – two pulsers, one for each hand, that vibrated alternately and stimulated bilateral brain activity: left and right sides, explicit and implicit memory, narrative truth and emotional truth, plot and meaning.  In other words, memoir. 

After three years of researching and reliving, two years in an MFA program, and eight months in counseling, I turned in a manuscript of two hundred and twenty pages to my agent.  All of my memories, or at least what my body has allowed me to remember, now assembled as letters reaching from one side of a page to the other.  I can trace them with my fingers, sound them out, and breathe between syllables.  I can smooth the pages with the back of my hand, or dog-ear them and slip them into an accordion folder or a file box.  I can put them on a shelf, under my desk, or on the bedside table.  They are words on a page, just words, and I hold the pen.

I have remembered.  And I am new.

Cinelle Barnes is a creative non-fiction writer and educator from Manila, Philippines. She writes memoirs and personal essays on trauma, growing up in Southeast Asia, and on being a mother and immigrant in America. In 2014, she was nominated for the AWP Journal Intro Award for Creative Non-Fiction, and in 2015 received an MFA from Converse College. In 2016, she was chosen to be a participant in the inaugural Kundiman Creative Non-Fiction Intensive in New York City.

Beth Walker

This week I lost a companion of 22 years. I was writing at my desk as usual, and somehow it dove from my hands onto my vinyl floor, nib straight down, Kamikaze style. Even with my glasses off, as I often do to write with a pen, I could tell that the nib was bent. That too-good-to-be-true ether of wish-fulfillment, also known as the Internet, could not tell me where to buy a new nib.

I bought another fountain pen that day, price be damned.

But I’ll always remember my first. I had bought it as a birthday/grad-school graduation gift for myself, and I have filled many journals with it. Nothing announces, “Hey, I’m a writer,” like a gold-appointed pen. I had wanted one since childhood upon finding a malachite Scheaffer empty, broken, and forgotten in my grandmother’s fancy leather purse. Yes, I was a snooper. I had never seen an old-fashioned pen before. Its ability to transport me to another time and place became an early part of my fantasy to live the writer’s life.

Full of nostalgia yesterday, I flipped through a bunch of my old journals, alternately embarrassed then bored at the life I had lived on paper. Still, I could distinguish the telltale thick stroke of the nib and the royal blue ink immediately, so regal against the intimidating green I used to dash off a few lines between grading papers. I can almost remember holding my black lacquered Parker, heavy and serious, to the paper; it is probably just as well that I don’t recall many of the stories I wrote with it.

Very few times in my life have things happened in slow motion. One was trying to return to work after my first round of chemo. Never one to take the elevators, I did that day. When the doors slid open, the hallway stretched infinitely as in a horror movie down to the other end, where my office is located. The walk felt terminal, and I realized that day that I would not be back for an entire academic year. Nevertheless, I didn’t realize while I was on bed-rest that my writing would stretch too far out for me to grasp, so my favorite pen lay for a year in my antique cherry stationery secretary–a writing gift from my grandmother–its ink evaporating.

Able to sit up again, I had gotten it out last summer and was re-living the old pleasure of writing with thick ink without bothering to scratch out or re-think, just flow and go. Flash forward exactly a year later and there I was, clutching and clawing at the air in slow motion as it baton-ed away from me. I yelled, I think, before it even had time to hit the floor, and I’ve been in mourning ever since.

In that moment, though, I flashed back to my childhood one summer night when my brother and I were trying to catch fireflies. It was a moment of physicality and imagination–a Rosebud moment when it was enough to just be in the world. To catch without killing required not only quick reflexes but a whimsy and a cruelty that make friends only in childhood. We were careful to let them glow in the mason jars only for a little while before screwing off the lids, though we probably shook the jars more than we should have. Considering that chemo makes me forget what I did last week, I marvel that my body made my mind recall that strange little clap-dance from 35 years ago. My poor fountain pen: that’s what I was doing, trying in slow motion to catch light.

Now that my body is remembering what it could do before chemo, the loss is bittersweet.

Beth Walker‘s work has recently been published in Storm Cellar, The Atrium, and Rag Queen Periodical, and she has poetry forthcoming in the anthology BARED. Long essays appear in the books Critical Insights: American Creative Nonfiction and New Perspectives on Detective Fiction: Mystery Magnified.

Dawn Cunningham

Going a day without writing is damaging to my psyche. Those tidbits of thoughts that won’t leave me alone are best written on paper to escape the confinement of my synapses. Without releasing the synapses, my mind comes overburdened with screams walking through my life.

This happened to me after my son was diagnosed with cancer. My mind became weighted, as if a bottle was filled with soda, ready to explode; however, the words couldn’t escape. Grief does strange things to a person. I wanted to write but for some reason I feared writing. I even feared reading my favorite story lines and favorite authors. The absolute joys of my life (other than my children and grandchildren) had left me, ran away, abandoned me to the noise scrambling within, the synapses not firing as they once did. I couldn’t write a simple poem. On occasion, I would get a line to come out. I even attempted sketch-writing but this did nothing to free the words sealed in my brain. Poetry, the genre I normally write in, was gone—along with journaling. Journaling had always been my partner in crime, sort of speaking. I always carried a journal with me. In time, even carrying a journal with me dissipated. I knew this wasn’t writer’s block; I’ve never believed in writer’s block, and I still don’t. This was a part of me that sneaked up and unconsciously said, “You don’t deserve joy.” My mind had imprisoned me, had taken away my capability to write words, to enjoy words on a page. Writing and reading was my inspiration—had been my inspiration: it was gone.

I don’t know how or exactly when my writing began to come out of the darkest deepest corner. Somewhere, the synapses decided to fire. Writing fought its way out of the prison. I was dying, and writing knew it. This is when I realized, “Storytelling keeps the World alive.” This is what the Native Americans meant, I thought; this is why Granma Ginny told her stories, I thought; she knew, her Native American blood knew. Stories weren’t only lessons and reminders of the past but part of the body; without the story, life doesn’t exist. I knew I had to tell the story. Before my son died from the cancer called PNET, I began to write the struggles: mine and his. It was time to tell the story.

Sometime after beginning this process, I realized that writing had kept me alive through another issue: a marriage gone sour. Reading through my journals to discover the story, I realized the story started several years prior to my son’s cancer. I had kept some part of me in the words placed in my journals, a part of me that had to be rediscovered. Learning about me again is when writing took on the life it needed for me to express what I was not and to find who I was and to become who I am now; writing keeps me growing. It took a tragedy to realize what writing does for me. Today, writing is strong with me. When I don’t write, depression sets in, takes life out of me. Even if I am dropping to the pillow with eyes ready to close, I find a way to write just one line—on my computer, in my journal, in a notepad on my phone. I must write to stay alive. I must write to live. Storytelling keeps ME alive.

Writing is an essential survival tool, just as much as food, water, shelter, and clothing. Writing is nourishing me, clothing me, sheltering me, and loving me. Writing, like music for a musician, like the dance for a dancer, like the paint for a painter, is the expression of self-discovery and self-wonderment, being the person you are supposed to be. This is how a person learns who s/he is and keeps that person within some form of sanity. Writing brings out the emotions to release the overpowering urge of self-destruction.

The beginning of Dawn Cunningham’s career in writing began with her grandmother’s encouragement, where she learned “Stories Write the World,” a Native American tradition passed down through the females in her family. Her grandmother, Virginia Cunningham, persuaded her to continue her education to better equip her in “writing the stories,” earning a BGS and MA. Ms Cunningham’s work appears in Confluence, The Voices Project, Misfit Magazine, Clitature, Shuf Poetry, Flare: The Flagler Review, and others.